I’ve been thinking a bit about this as I’ve only recently begun to corner properly (or sone approximation of properly lol).
Pushing the bars down with the inside hand to further bike lean FORCES you to transfer weight to the outside pedal. Your center of gravity is to the outside, relative to the plane of the bike frame. The only way to not fall off the bike in that position is to increase force on the outside pedal.
Conversely, if you have increased pressure on the outside pedal, it is NOT POSSIBLE to ALSO have your center mass to the inside, or even centered with the plane of the frame. The only way to increase pressure on the outside pedal is to move your center mass to the outside of the bike (or simply tilt the bike to the inside relative to your body, which again we’re back to pushing the inside bar down).
As an exercise…going into a left hand turn, you can ONLY put pressure on the right pedal, without. leaning the bike. You’ll immediately turn RIGHT, not left.
It looks like you get a little wobble on the front wheel and then it completely slips out. I agree w/ some of the other posts in that you are a bit too upright…your arms also appear pretty straight, its hard to tell if they are locked, which wouldn’t be good either. I think getting your chest lower will help the front tire track better.
The approach to the corner looks pretty solid though. From a form standpoint, your elbows should be soft and your chest lower, closer to the handlebar with your weight being actively driven through the outside foot. Bike body separation is also important, where you lean the bike more than your body. There is a point though, where the bike will slip. If you listen to a recent TR podcast, Pete Morris talks about making the tires “sing” when cornering, which is an indication that you are at the limit of the grip of the tire. Try to find some crit analysis videos and watch how they turn as well. Good luck and heal up quick.
@hugo1 if you are getting gaps in a corner & when you look back you see riders sitting upright with straight arms it could also just be that you’re scaring the crap out of them and they’re sitting the eff up in the interest of self preservation. Either way, effective!
Seriously, though, I find your advice re: cornering on a bicycle to be novel & it is the opposite of what everybody else has advised me to do. I know cycling weekly & GCN advise to lean the bike more than your body into a corner you really want to rail. So it’s refreshing to have something different to talk about.
Somebody should shoot this question to the podcast: hang your body into the corner and leave the bike upright or lean the bike into the corner and keep your body upright? That should generate some real discussion.
I’m quite new to road bikes but have ridden different kinds of motorcycles, too fast for my own good, for a long time. Since the beginning on a road bike I’ve been able to drop racers in corners, having 50-100 W less than they have (they catch up quickly). They simply lack cornering technique, no matter how much they have been competing or how high their ftp is. Bicycles are a joke in comparison to motorcycles, whether it’s motocross or superbikes on asphalt. People should, for speed and safety, look more at what the most skilled people do in corners, fast motorcycle riders. And yes, my ftp has risen quite a lot since I was new.
New tires have a coating remaining on them called mold release, so that they are better removed from the molds in manufacturing. It’s slippery. You should ride enough on the cornering surfaces of the tires at lower intensities before counting on them in hard cornering. You can reach the side profiles of the tires for this purpose by leaning the bike much more than your body in some slow-speed turning (or not even turning) maneuvers.
Additionally there’s the old adage regarding not using untested equipment for a “race…”
No, the purpose is similar - to have the CG further inside and allow the bike to stay as upright as possible, riding as close as possible to the center of the tire where you have the most tire contact patch flexibility. As @hugo1 indicated - MotoGP light, emphasis on the light part.
I ended up pulling out my trusted Wilson Bicycling Science (3rd edition), but Wilson is pretty mum on the subject, except to note the outside-pedal-down technique is needed because “the limit of cornering traction on good dry pavement is typically 40deg or more,but the inside pedal typically strikes the pavement at 30-35deg”. He also talks about the knee-inside technique, as it keeps the bike more upright, “keeps a little more of the tire tread on the pavement” and counters the decrease in mechanical trail that results when leaning.
Nibali does it, Wilson thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll keep doing it.
After reading Wilson (and his point regarding mechanical trail vs lean angle), I went back to the OP’s video. Look at the view from behind, step very slowly through the last few tenths of a second before the fall, keeping a close eye on the front wheel steering angle. The first symptom that something is going wrong is the front wheel turning in sharply - before the rear wheel breaks out. Sounds like good ole Wilson was right again - past a certain leaning angle, the built-in mechanical trail that stabilizes the front end goes away, making the steering first neutral, then divergent unstable. The front wheel bites, the bike pitches forward, the now-unloaded rear wheel skids out.
I think an important point of discussion here should be WHY the accepted techniques are the best. Specifically. I’m no expert, especially with motorcycles, but it seems that there are a cpuple of important differences between them. Mainly that, uh, a motorcycle has a motor. This much higher speeds.
So what does this mean? It means you have to have a miluch lower center of gravity to get through a turn at 80mph instead of 40mph. And the only way for a motorbike rider to lower the center of gravity more than countersteering will allow (again, limited by bike clearance on the side) is by hanging a human off the side of the bike as low as possible.
Now…WHY on a bicycle is weighting the outside foot best practice? Why (and this is very much just my uneducated opinion now here…) Is hanging off the side of a bicycle into a turn not helpful, and generally not done? Because there is no need. You can lean the bike as far as you want, until the bike is nearly horizontal. Clearance is not the limiting factor. Lowering the center of gravity can be done as much as needed simply by countersteering more and increasing bike lean angle.
But…WHY is weighting the outside foot on a bicycle done? I’ll argue (and again…purely opinion based) it is purely for stability purposes. Motorcycles have suspension. Road bikes do not. Suspension effectively increases traction over uneven surfaces (and, even smooth asphalt can qualify as an “uneven surface”). So putting all your body weight on the outside pedal, with 2 large hinges (ankle and knee) between the point of contact and the bulk of your body weight, effectively turns most of your mass into “sprung” weight, whereas it was not when most of it was firmly planted on your saddle.
You can’t rely on the suspension on a motorbike. You have to unweigh your butt in corners or you’ll either bounce off or lose traction and slide off. After carving corners for some time, legs should be tired.
All that talking about pushing one side of the bar or putting weight on a peg/pedal are just queues for counter-steering and maintaining proper, smooth and balanced body position. Your entire body has to act suspension.
Stiff arms and back, weight on your butt, pushing away from the asphalt because it’s scary, means you’ll either fall off or risk doing it, or you’re so slow that you have huge margins for error and because of those margins stay on your wheels. OP did all that, and maybe he even brakes when he realized that he entered the corner too fast and went wide. Unless overtaking, aim for high exit speed, instead of bombing in, missing apex and then hit the brakes.
Also, don’t let me start on trail braking into corners. Once again you’d tell me I know nothing.
Try it, and you will understand why it’s not a good idea. First, steering gets completely ineffective way before that (hold your bike leaned out to just before the handlebars touch the ground, then turn said handlebars, and see what happens), and second, the tires can’t generate traction at high angles as you start riding on the sidewalls.
Just looks like a simple case of too much speed for that corner. Also looks like that pavement was pretty poor and you were dealing with some crowning in the road when your front end let go.
It depends. On non-racing tyres, regular sport bike, regular asphalt, I would be very wary of leaning until the peg scrapes the asphalt. It’s possible, but it’s always very possible that the rear or front tyre loses traction totally. On touring or street motorbikes, regular tyres, I would definitely not try to scrape any pegs on the asphalt. However, racing bike on warm racing tyres, you should be able to scrape the pegs.
When riding in the wet or when it’s very cold, forget about scraping any pegs. It’s all about riding smoothly and keeping the bike as upright as possible while going as fast as possible, meaning you have to lean off the bike (point your belly button, use your left or right cheek, do something with your feet - or whatever queue you like).
Thanks for all the replies! Follow up question. Here are the same corners, but where I make it (these clips were from a selection of 3 from a field of ~15 at a practice race between me and my teammates) I am in the front for both in a very similar way:
